In online gaming, game hosting services and game developers have created a number of ways to track and personalize the online gaming experience. One drawback of existing systems is that many of the features have grown up independent of each other. Games send blobs of data about garners back and forth to a central service, but the service has no way to understand and aggregate the data outside of the game context. Games can host their own Websites, but the data displayed there is not universally accessible to other games.
In a sense, then, the service and games offer two parallel communities that offer great—but separated—resources for garners. First, in the game community, while playing a game, the gamer can see the community of others who play the specific game, the leaderboards for that game, and his personal achievements in that game. A game can tell a gamer, from the Service data, if a Friend is online, but it can't tell the gamer what, exactly that Friend is doing on the Service or when he will be available.
Second, in the service community, the service knows a game player's history, all of the games he's played, the amount of time he spends online, the size of his Friends list and all of the games that Friends have played or are playing, the Friends invites sent and received, the Messages sent and received, and all of the Feedback the gamer has given and received.
Systems have tried to leverage these on-line communities to match various players to allow them to play multi-player games. Nevertheless, in general such systems, which typically emphasize skill or experience in a single game or small family of games, do not group players who are likely to enjoy shared interaction based on social and/or personal considerations. That's because these social factors, which depend on large aggregates of data across many game types and session, cannot easily be taken into account when matching players for a single game. Matchmaking systems in the gaming world do not produce close relationships between individual players.
Further, players have been known to artificially distort information collected by a system pertaining to the a players skills and/or social interactions. For example, a player may be able to provide artificially positive or negative feedback about other players. This form of cheating can render player rankings unreliable.